


Eulogy

by Bexinthecity247



Category: Bodyguard (TV 2018)
Genre: Alternative Scene, F/M, Sort Of, is she dead, or is she alive, so fuck it, tired of wondering, who knows - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-08
Updated: 2019-06-08
Packaged: 2020-04-23 02:39:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,530
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19141897
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bexinthecity247/pseuds/Bexinthecity247
Summary: Alternative scene for I think, episode 4.





	Eulogy

**Author's Note:**

> You can blame Lea for this one. :)  
> I don't love how it turned out, but then I never do haha.

Her face, her infuriatingly beautiful face stared back at him from the podium. His eyes met hers, roaming over the very green specks of the iris in  the hazel pools of intensity , searching for something other than the hollowness he felt in himself. But her expression was flat, her eyes blank, emotionless despite the slight smile carved across her face. Somewhere in the recess of the great hall, music started playing, a dull hymn that he ha d  heard too many times in his life, each time signifying a loss greater than the last. This was by far the worst, however.

"Julia... Julia was one of the greatest women I had the pleasure of knowing. She was formidable, passionate, determined. ”  T he all too familiar voice said, and his eyes shot to a man he despised. “And if she could hear you now, she’d tell us all to shut up, stop maudlin, and get back to our lives. And believe you and me, Julia, was … a wonderful edition to any circle. She was a true pioneer of everything she believed in, she wanted to change the world... and I am always  honoured  to be able to call her my wife...”

The rest of his spiel was swallowed up by the pounding in David’s ears. How dare he? How dare a man like Roger  Penhaligon  pretend that he worshipped the woman that was Julia Montague when he would be no doubt, reveling in her death.  He didn’t fucking know her! He never saw the vulnerability in her eyes, or the way she bit her lip when she came. He never saw her under the covers when they confessed their childhood passions and giggled like kids. 

He gripped the order of service a little tighter in his hand, creating wrinkles on Julia’s face that she would never live out to see, and ground his teeth. He looked to his left, to his right but he was surrounded by men and women dressed in stuffy black suits and when he looked to the front pew where that prick sat, David saw his arm was around an elderly woman. A woman he  recognised  from the hospital but  who  had made a point of ignoring him. He wanted to escape, desperate to get back to his cocoon of misery, alcohol and darkness. But he was forced to stay by the tomb of people around him and nausea burned in his stomach as it rose like a phoenix from the ashes; he couldn’t do this, shouldn’t have come. 

“Death... is only the beginning,” a voice boomed across the chapel and David dragged his sore eyes to look at the face of an old man swathed in a black cloak, a white collar around his neck. The bite of nausea rose again. “And when we will commit our dear, Julia Elizabeth Montague, into the ground, be assured, we are only committing the body, for her soul lives on. Lives on in you, and you, and in the air, we breathe...” the speech trailed off as David fought the urge to stand and shout. What bullshit was this? She wasn’t anywhere, she was fucking dead. There were no parts of her soul floating around, soothing his scars and letting him touch her. She was nothing now. Nothing but a whisper in his memory, a locked box inside his heart. She was nothing and no one.

Death is final. That’s the truth for those who don’t believe in god, David thought bitterly as he loosened his tie. Why had he come? He hadn’t been formally invited, had managed to talk his way through the security detail (the one who would probably have done a better job at protecting her life) and now he was sat wishing he had never bothered coming at all. There was no one here he wanted to talk to beside the woman in the big mahogany closed casket at the front of the altar, adorned by loving flowers from people who probably didn’t give a shit when she was alive.

‘Daughter’ was spelt with the most exquisite white and pink lilies and it suddenly occurred to him that maybe he really didn’t know her at all. He only knew her in the darkness of trauma, under the sheets as they tried to  pretend  they weren’t at odds with each other. David had never even thought of Julia as someone’s daughter, once their little girl so full of hope and dreams.  He had spent so much time convincing himself that only he really knew, but now a cold  realisation  was settling in that the opposite was possibly true. He swallowed the burn rising in his gullet and loosened the tie even more, undoing the top button of his shirt. It was November, the thick of English winter yet he felt like he was on fire, like every part of his body that she had touched and changed was combusting. Including his heart. 

“Excuse me,” he murmured to the far too posh people sitting to his right, the ones that trapped him in the pew in this stuffy old church, which was so unlike Julia, he would have laughed had he not felt like she had torn his world apart. 

The men and women along the row fixed him with dirty glances as he shuffled along, blocking their view of what they no doubt thought of as the greatest show on the planet. He wanted no part of it, and he was pushing his way through funeral goers to burst out into the dark grey world of London, his heart racing, chest heaving as the panic building deep in his belly erupted and he swerved to the side of the building, leaning back against its stony wall. When his vision had stopped blurring, David pulled his tie off, only then noticing how his hands were shaking furiously .

What the fuck had this woman done to  him?  He took in deep breath after deep breath, trying to recall all the stupid exercises he’d been recommended over the years, but her face still loomed in front of him, bloodied, bruised and hovering between life and death. If he had only gotten to her five minutes sooner, had stopped her going on. If only he had told her how he felt, she might have been delayed long enough to still be standing here, aloof but always his, deep down. Except she wasn’t his. He bent down to pick up the dropped pamphlet, turning it over to run his finger over her face like he’d done in the postcoital hours of several mornings. 

“You need to go in sir or move along.” His head snapped up to see a man dressed respectfully in black, but clearly not a part of this circus. The funeral director looked sympathetic enough, but he couldn’t possibly know who David was, or even care that he had been the cause of them being here, in this exact moment; he was why she died. 

Beyond the man’s shoulder, he could see a slew of news reporters crowded around the edge of the c hurchyard . Vultures to the very end. He moved around the church until he was out of sight of the procession, still gripping the last piece of Julia’s legacy, and in the thick of the older churchyard. He sloped along, momentarily marvelling at the decrepit and desecrated gravestones and tombs that belonged to Victorian aristocrats, and paupers, all mixed into one, winding his way to the old entrance gate that he’d snuck through only an hour previously. Where was he going to  go?  He coul dn’t go to Vicky’s, didn’t feel like explaining where he’d been because then he would have to explain that Julia was more to him than just a principal and he wasn’t ready to explain that to anyone just yet, maybe not ever.

David swore when he tripped over the edge of an old grave and when he straightened himself up, his breath caught, his lungs seizing under the weight of what he saw before him. She was there, standing serenely at the other end of the churchyard like a vision he knew he couldn’t be having. She turned to look at him and he blinked; is this what madness felt like? He wondered as he swallowed, his tongue scratching along his sudden dry mouth. She looked … well she looked battered, bruised, and damaged but there. He knew it was a product of whatever longing he had inside him, a manifestation of his guilt, of lost love, the trauma of everything he’d been through in the past week or so, but what if it wasn’t? It had to be. Julia was dead.

“David...” it was  definitely her  voice. And it made his vision blur, his heart  accelerate . She looked weaker but she was there, fifty yards in front of him and he was hesitant to think it but... she looked alive. She was moving closer and he looked around to see if anyone else had noticed, if only for evidence that he was not hallucinating. But they were alone in this part of the graveyard. “I’d hoped I’d find you here.”


End file.
